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Just an Eating Day

So today both my job and my free time were centered around the consumption of food.
I went to one event this morning, at the shinto shrine, Kanazawa Jinya, located inside of Kenrokuen. There was going to be a blessing at the shrine of this year's humuro-manju, which are a kind of Japanese sweet (think a sweet bun filled with red bean) and are eaten on July 1st in Kanazawa.


The manju are a little hard to see in this photo, but on the black tray there are pink, green, and white blobs...

And that was the only event I attended today. Around one I took the reporter who was sorta just assigned to keep me occupied in the afternoon, Mr Shimizu, to a cafe called Cafe Dumbo which was right behind the office building (but he'd never heard of it, surprisingly). I had a really solid pastrami sandwich and a heavenly chai tea latte.


According to Shimizu, I suit this kind of cafe and he took this photo to illustrate how I look like a painting...


The heavenly latte in question.

I'm amassing quite the knowledge of local, artisan coffee shops in Kanazawa. I'm more or less making it a point to track them down and try them, rather than Starbucks. The coffee, food, and atmosphere are ALWAYS better, and it's just nice to relax in places that are off the main grid. It makes me feel like a local and like I know some secrets that even the people that live here full-time don't know. With half of these places I wish I could just transport them to New Haven because the only unique coffee shop there is Koffee? and it's quite a hike from JE. But I digress.

After lunch since it was raining and because we had nothing else to do Shimizu drove me to Higashi chaya (tea district) and we got some ice cream...


Green tea ice cream, red bean, a little bit of sweet mochi, and some gold just for good measure.

And that was it. I had nothing else to do and got to go home around 4:15...tomorrow I'm going sightseeing with Zoey and her host mom to a traditional village not far from Kanazawa so that's exciting! And then I just have to survive three days of work before my chuukanyasumi i.e. my 6 day vacation. WHOOT. Hard to believe I've already been here more than three weeks...

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